Polygon's open-letter to BioWare regarding their open-world-like games.

Picking a name or gender for the character does not make a game an RPG.

Custom created characters are great but there is no way that ME3 was an RPG as Shepard was mostly on auto dialogue but i still love the game.

They are.

Problem is people have bad labels for them that makes it easy to say one is not really a "RPG", which presumes definition to the term.

It has no meaning to begin with, other than what we give it. For video games it's even more complicated because of the types of games out there, rogue-likes, dunegon crawlers, turn-based, action, pause and play, tactical, all of that. There is a lot of wiggle room for myriad of systems, it's just easier, although wrong, to categorize them as being one or the other and even easier to say one is more valid than the other.

It is tackling the same idea from a design standpoint at a different angle. Like the differences between Burning Wheel or  Pathfinder, or Fate and GURPS. It's more or less the same debate.

I agree... Bioware games are really just Bioware games.  They lap over different genres and defy solid classification, if you will... and I think that's not a bad thing.  I do think ME3 was an RPG... not as much as RPG as some would like, but there was still enough flexibility in Shep's' personality to classify it as an RPG.  There were still enough different ways to develop the character's combat characteristics to label it an RPG from that perspective... and decisions made in the previous games (in which Shepard's character was undergoing most of the development) did carry over and have impacts in ME3... and there were decisions made during the game that structured the remaining story and world state differently.  Much of the autodialogue would change depending on that actual decisions the player had made to that point (so still really determined by the player... just not in as obvious a way as the dialogue wheel).

Even so, Bioware didn't label the Mass Effect Trilogy as an RPG.  You will not find the term on their disk cases.  It's the media and retailers that slap the genre label on it.

TW3 is also considered to be a RPG... but it's not one in which Geralt's personality and character can be developed even to the extent of Shepard's.

lol

You're not making a whole lot of sense here.  In your previous post, you clearly said that the fans who completed the content would be the first to complain if it was left out.  Firstly, how would people even "complete content" that was left on the cutting room floor before a game released... that the developer never even spent the money to develop because it would make the game needlessly long.

Here I'm talking about reversing this trend in making games longer and longer and longer just to justify charging folks $100 for them... because there seems to be this notion floating around the industry that something that totally consumes a player's entire life for months at a time is allegedly the only game people will buy.  I say that notion is a false one.... I'm certainly isn't the only one here who prefers games somewhat shorter than the likes of TW3 and finds that the time commitment expected by these HUGE games a deterrent from buying them since another person has stated as much in this same thread.

I have found that stating how hard it is to define what an RPG is, usually precedes the removal or diluting the very mechanics largely seen as "role-playing mechanics" 

I remeber it being called a shooter back at the time of release. JE was action-adventure. SWTOR is a MMO. But after playing all three of them... I really did not feel like I was playing something radically different from BG2. (shrug)

Not mine.  Following is a quote of the complete text from the back of the case and the term "RPG" doesn't appear on the front either or in any of the very fine print either.  So, if it's on yours, tell me where.

I agree that Bioware games are their own thing. And I don't care how much they are RPGs in the traditional sense, if there is such a thing at all. Either one likes their style of semi-set protagonists and party based gameplay, or not.

Question is if open world meshes well with that style. Imo it does not, but perhaps Bioware just needs to adapt it more to fit their style. Right now it seems to me Bioware is trying to make their games fit open world, which is the wrong approach. They should be thinking about how they can use non-linear open world to their advantage. To enrich their narrative, not dilute it.

There's various documentaries on mass effect where they (Hudson in specific) reference role playing various times. Doesn't need to have "RPG" on the cover to be so.

Please link to some of that documentation then.  There are casual references to role playing and then there is officially labeling it as a "RPG."  Certainly the box describes several elements people often associate with role playing and RPGs... but they stopped short of officially classifying it as a RPG on the box.